NAME

hunt - a multi-player multi-terminal game

SYNOPSIS

hunt [-bcfmqSs] [-nname] [-tteam] [-pport] [-wmessage] [host]

DESCRIPTION

The object of the game hunt is to kill off the other players. There are
no rooms, no treasures, and no monsters. Instead, you wander around a
maze, find grenades, trip mines, and shoot down walls and players. The
more players you kill before you die, the better your score is. If the
-m flag is given, you enter the game as a monitor (you can see the action
but you cannot play).
hunt normally looks for an active game on the local network; if none is
found, it starts one up on the local host. The location of the game may
be specified by giving the host argument. This presupposes that a hunt
game is already running on that host, see huntd(6) for details on how to
set up a game on a specific host. If more than one game if found, you
may pick which game to play in.
If the -q flag is given, hunt queries the local network (or specific
host) and reports on all active games found. This is useful for shell
startup scripts, e.g., csh(1)’s .login.
The player name may be specified on the command line by using the -n
option.
The -c, -s, and -f options are for entering the game cloaked, scanning,
or flying respectively.
The -b option turns off beeping when you reach the typeahead limit.
The -t option aids team playing by making everyone else on one’s team
appear as the team name. A team name is a single digit to avoid
conflicting with other characters used in the game.
The -pport option allows the rendezvous port number to be set. This is
a useful way for people playing on dialup lines to avoid playing with
people on 9600 baud terminals.
The -wmessage option is the only way to send a message to everyone
else’s screen when you start up. It is most often used to say “eat slime
death - NickD’s coming in”.
When you die and are asked if you wish to re-enter the game, there are
other answers than just yes or no. You can also reply with a w for write
a message before continuing or o to change how you enter the game
(cloaked, scanning, or flying).
To be notified automatically when a hunt starts up, add your login to the
hunt-players mailing list (see huntd(6)).

PLAYINGHINTS

hunt only works on CRT (vdt) terminals with at least 24 lines, 80
columns, and cursor addressing. The screen is divided in to 3 areas. On
the right hand side is the status area. It shows damage sustained,
charges remaining, who’s in the game, who’s scanning (the “*” in front of
the name), who’s cloaked (the “+” in front of the name), and other
players’ scores. The rest of the screen is taken up by your map of the
maze. The 24th line is used for longer messages that don’t fit in the
status area.
hunt uses the same keys to move as vi(1) does, i.e., h, j, k, and l for
left, down, up, right respectively. To change which direction you’re
facing in the maze, use the upper case version of the movement key (i.e.,
HJKL). You can only fire or throw things in the direction you’re facing.
Other commands are:
f or 1 Fire a bullet (Takes 1 charge)
g or 2 Throw grenade (Takes 9 charges)
F or 3 Throw satchel charge (Takes 25 charges)
G or 4 Throw bomb (Takes 49 charges)
5 Throw big bomb (Takes 81 charges)
6 Throw even bigger bomb (Takes 121 charges)
7 Throw even more big bomb (Takes 169 charges)
8 Throw even more bigger bomb (Takes 225 charges)
9 Throw very big bomb (Takes 289 charges)
0 Throw very, very big bomb (Takes 361 charges)
@ Throw biggest bomb (Takes 441 charges)
o Throw small slime (Takes 5 charges)
O Throw big slime (Takes 10 charges)
p Throw bigger slime (Takes 15 charges)
P Throw biggest slime (Takes 20 charges)
s Scan (show where other players are) (Takes 1 charge)
c Cloak (hide from scanners) (Takes 1 charge)
^L Redraw screen
q Quit
The symbols on the screen are:
-|+ walls
/\ diagonal (deflecting) walls
# doors (dispersion walls)
; small mine
g large mine
: bullet
o grenade
O satchel charge
@ bomb
s small slime
$ big slime
><^v you facing right, left, up, or down
}{i! other players facing right, left, up, or down
* explosion
\|/
-*- grenade and large mine explosion
/|\
Other helpful hints:
· You can only fire in the direction you are facing.
· You can only fire three shots in a row, then the gun must cool off.
· Shots move 5 times faster than you do.
· To stab someone, you face that player and move at them.
· Stabbing does 2 points worth of damage and shooting does 5 points.
· Slime does 5 points of damage each time it hits.
· You start with 15 charges and get 5 more every time a player enters
or re-enters.
· Grenade explosions cover a 3 by 3 area, each larger bomb cover a
correspondingly larger area (ranging from 5 by 5 to 21 by 21). All
explosions are centered around the square the shot hits and do the
most damage in the center.
· Slime affects all squares it oozes over. The number of squares is
equal to the number of charges used.
· One small mine and one large mine is placed in the maze for every new
player. A mine has a 2% probability of tripping when you walk
forward on to it; 50% when going sideways; 95% when backing up.
Tripping a mine costs you 5 points or 10 points respectively.
Defusing a mine is worth 1 charge or 9 charges respectively.
· You cannot see behind you.
· Cloaking consumes 1 ammo charge per 20 of your moves.
· Scanning consumes 1 ammo charge per (20 × the number of players) of
other player moves.
· Turning on cloaking turns off scanning — turning on scanning turns
off cloaking.
· When you kill someone, you get 2 more damage capacity points and 2
damage points get taken away.
· Maximum typeahead is 5 characters.
· A shot destroys normal (i.e., non-diagonal, non-door) walls.
· Diagonal walls deflect shots and change orientation.
· Doors disperse shots in random directions (up, down, left, right).
· Diagonal walls and doors cannot be destroyed by direct shots but may
be destroyed by an adjacent grenade explosion.
· Slime goes around walls, not through them.
· Walls regenerate, reappearing in the order they were destroyed. One
percent of the regenerated walls will be diagonal walls or doors.
When a wall is generated directly beneath a player, he is thrown in a
random direction for a random period of time. When he lands, he
sustains damage (up to 20 percent of the amount of damage already
sustained); i.e., the less damage he had, the more nimble he is and
therefore less likely to hurt himself on landing.
· Every 30 deaths or so, a “?” will appear. It is a wandering bomb
which will explode when it hits someone, or when it is slimed.
· If no one moves, everything stands still.
· The environment variable HUNT is checked to get the player name. If
you don’t have this variable set, hunt will ask you what name you
want to play under. If you wish to set other options than just your
name, you can enumerate the options as follows:
setenv HUNT name=Sneaky,team=1,cloak,mapkey=zoFfGg1f2g3F4G
sets the player name to Sneaky, sets the team to one, sets the enter
game attribute to cloaked, and the maps z to o, F to f, G to g, 1 to
f, 2 to g, 3 to F, and 4 to G. The mapkey option must be last.
Other options are: scan, fly, nobeep, port=string, host=string, and
message=string, which correspond to the command line options. String
options cannot contain commas since commas are used to separate
options.
· It’s a boring game if you’re the only one playing.
Your score is the decayed average of the ratio of number of kills to
number of times you entered the game and is only kept for the duration of
a single session of hunt.
hunt normally drives up the load average to be approximately
(number_of_players + 0.5) greater than it would be without a hunt game
executing.

STATISTICS

The -S option fetches the current game statistics. The meaning of the
column headings are as follows:
score the player’s last score
ducked how many shots a player ducked
absorb how many shots a player absorbed
faced how many shots were fired at player’s face
shot how many shots were fired at player
robbed how many of player’s shots were absorbed
missed how many of player’s shots were ducked
slimeK how many slime kills player had
enemy how many enemies were killed
friend how many friends were killed (self and same team)
deaths how many times player died
still how many times player died without typing in any commands
saved how many times a shot/bomb would have killed player if he hadn’t
ducked or absorbed it.

SEEALSO

AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Don Kneller, John Thomason, Eric Pettersen, Mark Day, and Scott
Weiner for providing endless hours of play-testing to improve the
character of the game. We hope their significant others will forgive
them; we certainly don’t.